“Music has always been a craft of borrowing. In traditional, or folk, music, melodies and lyrics were handed down from generation to generation. At every stage, musicians would change the tune or substitute words at will, adapting songs to their own situations.” (From the liner notes of the Illegal Art Project)

Illegal Art is sponsored by Brooklyn-based Stay Free! magazine, with support from the Online Policy Group, a nonprofit ISP devoted to free speech, and Prelinger Archives.

Found Illegal Art from a link on the Banned Music site. You might remember these guys as the ones responsible for Grey Tuesday last year.

So I am going down that road this week. Should be fun. Tune in: KBGA

Hope to write at some point today. Right now it’s almost 2AM. Headed to bed.

Usually I use an old photograph I have lying around for a muse. Today is a little different. Charles Harris, whom I found on a link from the NPR site as I was listening to a live Wilco show , agreed to let me hotlink an image I found on his site, and I went through a couple of ideas in my head over the next few days about what I would write.

So I am breaking with tradition in that I have seen the image more than 30 seconds before I write about it. So, I decided to go back to the original premise of writing only for 10 minutes. Recent writings were 20 minutes or so because I had someone else involved who was not used to the structure, and wasn’t ready to write like mad. For those folks, I extended it to 20 or even 30 minutes.

But now, I am back to bare bones. 10 minutes does not seem long enough, actually; 20 minutes feels about the right length in order to capture something raw and full of truth without too much over-thinking, so I will likely go back to 20 minutes in future endeavors.

But now, I present to you Driving to Warm Springs, 1985*

She looked away from me when I got out of the car. I kicked the dirt and inhaled on my cigarette. I had pulled off on a backroad off of 48 just outside of Anaconda and wanted to tell her how much I loved her and she sat in the car and turned away.

When she told me I had to take her to Warm Springs, I was not surprised. When she told me she wanted to ride in the back, I was not surprised. When she told me why she wanted to ride in the back, I was not surprised.

She said she wanted to remember the car the way she found it. And the way she found it, was as a passenger in the backseat when five of us clamored into it, me ending up at the wheel, for a ride on the highway, past Soquel, past Santa Cruz, after a drunken night on the beach back in ’77.

Seven years later, I’m driving her to Warm Springs and she won’t look at me and I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again.

It’s early morning. The smoke from my cigarette mixes with the fog in the air and I wonder where the past seven years of marriage went.

I flicked my cigarette to the ground and stomped it out for fear of starting a fire. I kick at the tire as I open the door and know that I loved her the best way I knew how, and that I infused our marriage with a tenderness borne of empathy and the understanding I had of her.

I got back into the car and started it up. I knew that it wasn’t my fault she’s mad, and I did not know if, or when, I would see her again. And I was sad. But I understood.

Full size image here

*Note: Warm Springs is where the insane asylum is in Montana.